Information Technology (IT) management may require performing remote management operations of remote systems to perform inventory, monitoring, control, and/or to determine whether remote systems are up-to-date. For example, management devices and/or consoles may perform such operations as discovering and/or navigating management resources in a network, manipulating and/or administrating management resources, requesting and/or controlling subscribing and/or unsubscribing operations, and executing specific management methods and/or procedures. Management devices and/or consoles may communicate with devices in a network to ensure availability of remote systems, to monitor and/or control remote systems, to validate that systems may be up-to-date, and/or to perform any security patch updates that may be necessary.
With the increasing popularity of electronics such as desktop computers, laptop computers, and handheld devices such as smart phones and PDA's, communication networks, and in particular Ethernet networks, are becoming an increasingly popular means of exchanging data of various types and sizes for a variety of applications. In this regard, Ethernet networks are increasingly being utilized to carry, for example, voice, data, and multimedia. Accordingly more and more devices are being equipped to interface with Ethernet networks.
The emergence of converged network interface controllers (CNICs) have provided accelerated client/server, clustering, and/or storage networking, and have enabled the use of unified TCP/IP Ethernet communications. The breadth and importance of server applications that may benefit from network interface controller (NIC) capabilities, together with the emergence of server operating systems interfaces enabling highly integrated network acceleration capabilities, may make NICs a standard feature of, for example, volume server configurations.
The deployment of NICs may provide improved application performance, scalability and server cost of ownership. The unified Ethernet network architecture enabled by NIC may be non-disruptive to existing networking and server infrastructure, and may provide significantly better performance at reduced cost alternatives. A server I/O bottleneck may significantly impact data center application performance and scalability. The network bandwidth and traffic loads for client/server, clustering and storage traffic have outpaced and may continue to consistently outpace CPU performance increases and may result in a growing mismatch of capabilities.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.